4 Tips to Code like a PRO

March 23rd, 2019

Thousands of programmers are coming in IT industry daily and already there is an uncountable number of programmers and coders in the industry. You may be one of them but what is the difference between you and the others?

The main job of a programmer is to write code. If you are writing the same code which is also written by the others then what's the difference between you and them?

There are many ways to solve a problem and so many ways to write code for the same problem.

Most of us pick the easiest way to code and solve the problem but there are programmers and coders in the industry who pick the best way to code and solve the problem.

That is the difference between them and you: doing the best code and doing the normal way of coding. This makes them Pro Developer.

Let's discuss some tips on how to code like a pro.

1. Coding Standards

If you want to Code like a Pro, you must have to follow the coding standards. Each language of coding has its own standards to follow.

Let's take a real example of PHP code, to write IF condition in PHP, most of the coders use below syntax:

Regular Code

if ($force == true) { }

But a Pro coder writes something like:

PRO Code

if ( true === $force ) { }

This is a YODA condition, in which a value is written left side of the variable (with the triple equal sign). Click here to read more about YODA condition. This was only 1 standard way of coding, but there are lots of coding standards to follow.

2. Think before you code

Whenever we get some problem, most programmers just jump on to the editor and start coding without understanding the exact problem. Most of the time, There assumptions proved wrong.

Try to understand the problem and think about multiple solutions, and then pick the best one of them.

3. Try to break your own code

Developers are not testing their own code and usually pass it to the tester, Tester returns a bulk of bugs! This is not the habit of a pro developer.

Every developer is also a tester.

A Pro developer tries to break his own code from various ways and improves it until the code seems the best and unbreakable.

Create a unit testing for your code and check whether the code is working in the unit tests or not. wiki

4. Use the code sniffer tools

There are lots of tools available to sniff the code. These tools check the mistakes made in the code and tell (report) you to fix them. Some tools are so smart that they fix the issues themselves and doesn't inform us!